The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is facing allegations of another cover-up after the minutes of a panel set up to examine “serious cases” failed to mention that rules on when to investigate benefit claimant suicides had been weakened.
The first meeting of the serious case panel took place in March 2020, just a month after the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed that DWP had strengthened its rules on when to carry out a secret internal process review (IPR).
The NAO had produced the briefing document in February 2020 after being asked to inspect DWP’s apparent failure to collect data on how many benefit claimants were taking their own lives.
The stronger new rules revealed in its briefing document meant an IPR had to be carried out when DWP became aware of any suicide of a claimant “regardless of whether there are allegations of Department activity contributing to the claimant’s suicide”.
But DWP admitted last week that the guidance was secretly weakened a year later, in April 2021.
This means the department now only examines suicides if there is already an allegation that DWP’s actions “may have negatively contributed to the customer’s circumstances”.
Disability News Service (DNS) has examined the minutes of all 14 meetings of the serious case panel, up to June 2023, and none of them mentions plans to weaken the guidance, including those meetings that took place before and after April 2021.
This is despite the panel’s terms of reference stating that it will “meet on a quarterly basis to consider serious systemic issues arising from cases and other insight” and will consider “various sources of insight” including “internal process reviews”.
Among its objectives is to “agree to recommendations for organisational learning” and “agree whether and how DWP need to take actions to improve processes and outcomes”.
But despite those terms of reference, the panel either never discussed the weakening of the IPR criteria, or it omitted those discussions from the public minutes.
For more than a decade, DNS has been revealing how DWP has covered-up evidence of links between its actions and the deaths of claimants, and how it has repeatedly tried to delay evidence of those links being released.
Academic and campaigner Dr China Mills has described this as “weaponising time”, a strategy to avoid being held accountable for those deaths, and denying justice to the relatives of those who lost their lives.
Imogen Day, whose sister Philippa’s death was caused by widespread flaws in the disability benefits system, said her family and others whose relatives had died due to DWP harm had been pushing for greater transparency and accountability by DWP.
She said DWP’s decision to weaken the IPR eligibility criteria and then cover it up was a step backwards in that campaigning and was “disappointing but unsurprising”.
She said: “How do they know what went wrong if there isn’t an IPR?”
The Day family had fought through the courts and in the inquest into Philippa’s death to obtain the IPR into her death, and they are believed to be one of only two families to have been able to see an IPR.
She said that accessing DWP’s review into Philippa’s death had given her family “unbelievable comfort”, and the decision to weaken the IPR criteria would mean other families would not be able to receive that level of “closure”.
She said: “It’s really upsetting that other families are not going to receive that comfort and that knowledge.
“They will continue to wonder what it is that they could have done differently, when in reality it was the system that harmed their loved ones.”
DWP refused to comment on the latest allegations.
Paula Peters, a member of the national steering group of Disabled People Against Cuts, said it was an “absolute travesty” that DWP was “covering-up such hugely important issues” as suicides linked to its own actions and failings.
She said the cover-up was “a slap in the face of every family who grieves”.
She said: “We need to hold them to account, but also the families deserve justice.”
The National Audit Office (NAO) had failed by noon today (Thursday) to say if it was concerned that DWP had weakened the IPR criteria so soon after telling the NAO it had strengthened them.
But an NAO spokesperson said: “Our 2020 report was in response to a very specific request about the cost of collating information within DWP.
“We reviewed what information DWP held and what systems DWP had in place to collate this information.
“We do not currently have any plans to repeat this work.”
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